The New York Times: Algorithm Can Identify Dolphin Whistles

Work by researchers at National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at UT was featured in The New York Times. The work discovered a computer algorithm that is used to identify songs can also identify the signature whistles of bottlenose dolphins. Just as humans sound slightly different each time they sing a given song, a dolphin’s whistles vary, the story read. In a spectrograph analysis, these variations can cause confusion. “Sometimes the dolphin sings a little longer, sometimes a little higher,” Arik Kershenbaum, a postdoctoral fellow at NIMBioS said. “And there’s all sorts of acoustic variation underwater.”